Ever since Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life held gay readers in its thrall back in 2015, we’ve been waiting for another big fat queer themed novel to come along and sweep us into its sometimes uncomfortably tight embrace.Welcome The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai(Penguin Books. $27, www.rebeccamakkai.com), an engrossing, decades-long story of love and loss in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.
Unlike so many books with gay characters at their center, The Great Believers doesn’t take place in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, its set in Chicago (as well as Paris). The story is told in alternating chapters: In the first, which begin in 1985, we spend time with the friends and lovers of recently deceased Nico Marcus, a still unformed artist who has died in his early twenties; in the second, set thirty years later, we follow Nico’s younger sister who has travelled to France in search of her estranged daughter.
There’s suspense within each strand of the well-plotted story, and even more as the reader wonders how they will eventually come together. The Midwestern roots of Makkai and her characters seem to suffuse the book with a stolid, gentle kindness that counteracts some of the more harrowing episodes it chronicles. Absent is the bitchiness and severity that made A Little Life sometimes feel as repulsive as it was compelling. There’s an undeniable warmth to Makkai’s storytelling, and that, ultimately, is what makes The Great Believers a great read
